Why is Thor boring?
by Martin Skidmore 19-Oct-11
Thor is one of Marvel’s oldest and most powerful characters, and a prominent member of the Avengers. He was also fortunate up to 1982 in having stable creative teams. Why, then, did he rarely arouse interest in fans in the 1970s?
Illustration by Steve Whitaker, which accompanied the original publication.
[In the third of our extracts from the Martin Skidmore archive, we present, by popular request, his very first ever fanzine article, from his first ever fanzine, Worlds Collide 1, in 1982. To give a bit of historical context, this was written before (but not much before) Walt Simonson’s run as writer-artist (and later just writer) on Thor, from #337 (November 1983) to #382 (August 1987), which many saw, at least in its early stages, as revitalising the title and character, by taking him back to basics in the way John Byrne had with the Fantastic Four, and emphasizing the mythology in a way that had not been done since Jack Kirby’s run. It seems likely that there is something in the FA archives where Martin discusses Simonson’s 1980s Thor, and if we find it we’ll put it up here. The Simonson period on Thor mentioned below is an earlier run when he was only the penciller, from #260 (June 1977) to #271 (May 1978). The article is also notable for Martin assuming that his readers knew who the comics superstars of the day were, and so he refers to them by their surnames alone. I’ve added first names for clarity.
Martin revisited this article when writing a review of Essential Thor 5, and considered that the opinions expressed still held up three decades later. – TK.]
Thor is one of Marvel’s oldest and most powerful characters, and a prominent member of the Avengers. He has also been fortunate in having had stable creative teams. Why, then, has he rarely aroused interest in fans over the last decade?
Very few titles have managed to escape the focus of fandom so consistently, and for a comic which should be a major flagship title for Marvel to do so is rather surprising. In comparison, Thor the character has been much more interesting, particularly when written by [Steve] Englehart and [Jim] Shooter, at various times in The Avengers. This article will attempt to analyse the reasons for ten years of apathy towards Thor, the comic.
Responsibility for a comic’s success falls on its creators. In the last ten years only three pencillers have worked on more than four issues. Keith Pollard has taken care of the last three years, Walt Simonson the twelve months prior to that, and John Buscema the rest. Buscema was regularly placed in the Eagle awards during his long stint on the comic, but this may have had more to do with his work on Conan, and even so, he has never generated the excitement which such as [John] Byrne or [Neal] Adams have proved capable of inspiring. Also, there were frequent changes of inker during his stay, and it can’t be easy for an artist to produce his best work if he does not know what the end product is going to look like. I am very keen on the versatile Walt Simonson, but I don’t feel he produced his best work on Thor, and Tony DeZuniga, who inked all but two of his issues, was the wrong partner for him. Simonson’s work is better suited by the bold, flowing lines of an [Terry] Austin or [Bob] Layton. [When Simonson returned to the title, he inked his own pencils. – TK] Keith Pollard is one of those dependable, yet commonplace, artists that Marvel is so expert at producing (or finding). He has also been cursed with inks from Chic Stone and, more recently, uncharacteristically slapdash work from Gene Day.
The main responsibility, however, belongs to the writer. Gerry Conway, previously hailed as a major new talent, did this job until the middle seventies. The impression he gave was one of competent, yet regularized, plotting. His dialogue and characterization were a bit weak, however. He particularly fell into the trap of stereotyping many of the characters, especially the ‘Warriors Three’ [Fandral, Hogun, and Volstagg; Martin gives them nicknames below – TK], and not even attempting to scratch beneath the surface. His stories are particularly forgettable because Thor’s adversaries always seemed fairly minor, and difficult genuinely to worry about. To his credit, though, he did create Firelord, whose appearances have always been welcome.
Conway left in the summer of ’75, and did not show his true ability until quite recently at DC, and he was soon replaced by Len Wein, who scripted the book for 2½ years. Wein sent Thor into the future to battle the Time Twisters, to Asgard to remove Mangog from Odin’s throne, out into space on the Odinquest, and back to Asgard to find Loki had seized power. These were more memorable stories, which used the potential inherent in the book to much greater effect than Conway had done, but there was a slight flavour of déjà vu in the plotting, and he never quite came to terms with Stan Lee’s Shakespearian mode of speech, making various grammatical errors. The main fault with these issues, however, was the almost complete absence of characterization-oriented subplots. Incidentally, sales plummeted under Len Wein, from around 200,000 in Conway’s days, to less than 150,000.
Roy Thomas took over in June 1978, and stayed with the book for two years, which encompassed the False Ragnarok (six months) and Celestials (eighteen months) sagas. As usual, Roy’s scripting was practically flawless, but his pacing was too slow, presumably due to his being allowed to edit his own work. The only break from the two sagas written by Roy was a gem of a parody of the Superman films, additionally blessed with some beautiful Wayne Boring/Tom Palmer artwork.
Given a tough editor forcing the pace a little, Thomas’ sagas could have been classics. They remain satisfying, particularly the Celestials storyline, as they resolved so many long-standing puzzles, but this probably was more to do with Mark Gruenwald and Ralph Macchio, who are obsessed with such things.
They took over the scripting for the last three months of the Celestials saga, and followed with a few one-issue stories which returned Thor to more conventional superhero role. These were acceptable enough as such, but wasted the extra scope which Thor’s nature offers. Still, the comic needed a rest from Asgardian epics at that point, so they’re forgiven.
Last summer Doug Moench took as regular scripter, and he began immediately to devote more care and attention to Don Blake, while Thor has continued being a superhero. After such a short time (made even shorter by the Gruenwald/Macchio backup story for three months) it’s impossible to judge his version. Hopefully he’ll get around to resolving the Sif/Jane Foster dilemma which has been ignored for years. [In the end this was resolved by Simonson, who at a stroke wrote Don Blake and Jane Foster out of Thor, though in more recent years they have both returned. – TK]
The title has great potential. No comic featuring an individual character at Marvel has so many available types of setting for its stories, but the writers have not always made the most of this, not balancing cosmic/SF stories, Asgardian/mythical stories, and traditional superhero fare, as Stan Lee managed to do in the comic’s early years.
The supporting cast has been very badly handled over the years. Odin has never seemed remotely all-wise and Grim, Dashing and Fatcoward, the ‘Warriors Three’, must be prime contenders for the most stereotyped characters in comics, Volstagg being especially offensive. Balder, Sif and Heimdall have never been very interesting either. Another albatross around the writer’s neck is the corny dialogue, which must make scripting Thor very hard work.
The main reasons for the boredom which this title generates, though are twofold. The first is the repetition of plotlines, such as splits between Odin and Thor every couple of years, regular battles with Ulik, who doesn’t deserve such frequent appearances, and, worst of all, Loki as the main villain in every third story or so. Whilst Loki is obviously a major part of Thor’s life, it’s very difficult for a writer to do a fresh story with him, but everyone seems to feel obliged to try.
Secondly, it must be remembered that comics fail if they don’t appeal to kids, and thus we have the phenomenon of the ‘Compulsory Fight Scene’. As research for this article, I read the last ten years of Thor, and the vast majority of these scenes were almost indistinguishable from each other, due to most of Thor’s adversaries having very similar powers: Thor level super-strength. Even Loki, who appears so often, almost always uses somebody or something else for the physical stuff (Maurglon, a snow giant, Ulik, a different Thor, the Destroyer, Firelord, Armak (the first man), etc., etc.).
Thor is a great (pitiful?) example of wasted potential, due to its stereotyped supporting cast, Thor’s speech patterns, the repetitious plotting, and monotonous adversaries and fight scenes.
That is why Thor is boring.
Tags: Gerry Conway, John Bus, Len Wein, Martin Skidmore, Marvel, Thor
– THANKS for (re)printing this, tony – & for putting it in gontext…
( & including the witko drawing – which i assume accompanied the original article – was a very nice touch )
Yes, that illustration by Steve did go with the original article. I’ve expanded the caption to make that clear.
Thank you very much for reprinting this.
Martin’s reviews often left the reader in no doubt what he thought about the subject in question as he tended to either love or hate things with a passion. Therefore I am slightly surprised that he isn’t being as harsh as he could / should be towards some of the creators listed.
Personally, in the period between the departure of Kirby and the arrival of Simonson’s Beta Ray Bill and co, about the only time that I really became enthusiastic about the title was during the Len Wein issues, although they seem to be a collection of old foes being dusted off (including Loki and Ulik). Had Wein stayed at Marvel longer, no doubt the Absorbing Man and the Wrecker would have made an appearance (both having appeared in other Wein titles). Mind you, the Stiltman was a rather interesting choice !
The big problem with Thor, as Martin mentioned above, is that he was too powerful, in the same way that Superman was. This is why Englehart removed him from the Avengers line up: if you had Thor there, it didn’t matter who else was in the team as he could tackle the menace single-handed. This is what led to a lot of the villains being similar, basically big bruisers. What was needed was some Asgardian Kryptonite.
Certainly during this time the main supporting characters were basically just cut and pasted into the issue with no development.
I must say that I never thought of the “Shakespearian” dialogue as being one of the restrictions to the title, but now that I consider it I believe that Martin was right.
Moving off at a tangent, who is Thor appearing to give a lecture to in Steve’s picture ?
Loved this article. It requires a much longer response than I have the capacity to enter at this time, but I’ll try to get to one tonight.
Okay, here goes…
WHY IS THOR BORING?
While I admire Mr. Skidmore’s comprehensive approach to this question, examining various writer and artists and looking at story content while trying to come up with some key component that, once understood, will illuminate all concerned as regards this topic, I think we can simplify it greatly by asking a somewhat different question:
WHEN did THOR become boring?
Most serious students of Marvel’s THOR, when they look back over THOR’s long and illustrious publishing history, will generally be able to put their fingers immediately on two points when THOR became, well, shall we say, considerably less interesting, than it had been before:
* When Jack Kirby stopped drawing it (meaning, when Jack Kirby stopped plotting the book)
* When Roy Thomas stopped writing it
In actual fact, both answers are correct. What many people overlook is that when Kirby was working with Stan Lee in the early Silver Age, like all of Lee’s other artistic collaborators, Kirby did much more than simply draw the comic. Kirby did the basic artwork first, sometimes after talking to Mr. Lee and getting some germ of a story idea from him, other times entirely on his own. Mr. Lee took the art and added captions and dialogue and he did it very well, sometimes completely changing the whole tone and thrust from what the artist had originally intended (apparently, Ditko hated this so much that he quit Spider-man over it) — but still, the basic plot was generated by the artist, when he sat down and drew the story for the first time.
THOR became considerably less interesting when Kirby left. Kirby is capable of many, many things, but coming up with a boring plot isn’t one of them. Even FOREVER PEOPLE and DEVIL DINOSAUR and MACHINE MAN weren’t boring; his solo runs on BLACK PANTHER and CAPTAIN AMERICA were… acquired tastes, to say the least… but they were never, under any circumstances, boring.
Roy Thomas was Stan’s hand picked heir apparent, probably because Roy modeled his entire writing style after Stan. Roy did not have the great good luck to have Kirby or Ditko plotting his work, though, and, well, even at his best, Roy was to Stan Lee as Jim Starlin was to Jack Kirby… a half wattage imitation with few original ideas of his own.
Still, even a half watt Stan Lee is better than those who followed Roy on THOR… especially the execrable Gerry Conway, who may very well be the worst ‘writer’ to ever script a comic book… and yes, I say that having read a great deal of really really bad comics writing, including everything an obviously desperate Jerry Siegel ever turned in to Mighty Comics.
Yet beyond Marvel’s inevitable descent into utter mediocrity following the departure of Lee, Kirby, and Ditko from its founding titles… a descent that was temporarily reversed by the advent of Steve Englehart and Steve Gerber, the only two non-founding writers who ever equalled or exceeded the story quality benchmarks set by Stan and his collaborators… a descent which was evident across every Marvel title at that time, from SPIDER-MAN through FANTASTIC FOUR and X-MEN and AVENGERS up to and including IRON MAN, CAPTAIN AMERICA, and THOR and even, yes, SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOES… there is another reason why THOR has generally been uninteresting other anyone but Kirby, and it’s a profoundly simple one:
No one understands the concept.
You can’t write a good comic, or even a good piece of fiction, if you don’t understand your character concept. The Fantastic Four is good when it’s about a super powered family that has adventures. The Avengers is good when it’s about Earth’s Greatest Superheroes banding together to fight the battles no conventional force could ever handle. Spider-man is good when it’s about a guy whose personal life will always be screwed up by his superheroic activities… but who can never stop being Spider-man because then he would fail in his duty to his beloved Uncle Ben. The X-Men is good when it’s about a team of characters who are mutants — hated and feared by a world they are sworn to protect! Iron Man is good when it’s about a guy who, from the outside, lives a life that is completely enviable… yet who is utterly dependent on the armor he has invented to keep him alive. Daredevil works when it’s about a guy who wants to be an adventurer and a fighter but who promised his dad he would be a good student instead, so he has created an alternate identity where he can do what he wants… but only for a while before he has to hit the books again.
This is the essence of those characters and titles and concepts; it’s what makes them work. The Fantastic Four aren’t superheroes; they’re a family that has adventures together. The Avengers don’t fight street crime, they save the world. Spider-man can never be happy because to be happy he’d have to disappoint Uncle Ben. Etc, etc, etc.
(Mind you, I’m not saying that these characters have to conform to these essential concepts in order to be COMMERCIAL; the X-Men were fantastically popular under Claremont, Cockrum and Byrne, and for years at a time the fact that they were mutants was barely mentioned and only peripherally important to the stories they got involved in. But that was because, as the always wise Richard Howell has noted, everyone wants to READ a romance comic but no one wants to BUY a romance comic. Claremont turned the X-Men into a romance comic that fanboys could by without feeling embarrassed about it. That was the stroke of genius that made X-Men into the circulation juggernaut it was all through the 80s and 90s, and that so many other writers tried, with varying degrees of success, to rip off for their own derivative team concepts.)
You’ll notice I haven’t stated what THOR’s essential concept is, and there’s a good reason for that: THOR doesn’t have one.
No, seriously, stop and think about it for a second. THOR is probably the single founding Silver Age title that Marvel has that really has no underlying theme and no real essential concept to it. This is largely because Thor was conceived by Stan Lee to be Marvel’s “Superman”… something that’s evident when you look at the various elements that went into Thor as he was originally depicted… the meek and mild secret identity, the otherworldly origin, the character’s powers, and even the colors that went into Thor’s costume… plus, Thor is the only Silver Age Marvel hero who had a cape.
Stan had had great success stealing directly from DC before, in fact, we’ve all heard the story of how Martin Goodman told Stan to ‘do something like the Justice League’ and Stan (and Jack Kirby) responded by coming up with the Fantastic Four. But the Fantastic Four is actually nothing like the Justice League other than being a group of super powered characters who fight together; beyond that, everything about the FF is different from the Justice League… and in fact, everything about the FF is new and different and original; there had literally never been a superhero comic book or a superhero team anything like the FF prior to their first appearance. And that template… flawed, three dimensional characters with quirks and personalities and personal problems… was the entire foundation and thematic basis for Marvel’s Silver Age and the chief characteristic that not only differentiated Marvel’s characters from DC’s, but that also fueled the rampant interest that adolescent comics fans had in Marvel’s line up.
But with Thor, neither Stan nor Jack came up with anything anywhere near as singular as the Fantastic Four. Oh, sure, it’s a pretty big leap from “last survivor of a doomed alien civilization” to “exiled Thunder God”… but these are simply details of the origin of each character. Superman has an essential concept… he’s us, just better, in every way… physically, mentally, emotionally, and most important of all, morally. Superman’s origin doesn’t matter and is immaterial; he’s NOT an alien, not emotionally… he’s The Perfect Human. He’s, well, Superman. Anything we can do, he can do better… but we love him anyway, because he does it all for us. He’s, literally, what we all should aspire to be.
Thor doesn’t have that concept, and lacking that essence, well, he really doesn’t have anything else.
And without a strong central concept to work with… well, that’s not going to stop Jack Kirby from coming up with exciting and interesting plots, but there never has been and never will be another Jack Kirby. For mere mortals like Roy Thomas, the lack of a strong driving central concept is very significant.
With each succeeding step away from the original writers and artists, every Marvel title has increasingly floundered. Again, the only exceptions to this are Englehart and Gerber. Every other writer who has worked at Marvel since the early Silver Age has been a pallid imitation of Lee/Kirby/Ditko at best… and very few of them seem to have had any clue as to what the essential concept of any comic they might have been assigned to might be (something demonstrated by the way writer/editors like Conway, Wein and Wolfman used to just trade assignments without anyone really noticing any difference in what was going on in their books… one super soap opera with vaguely Stan Lee-esque captions and dialogue being much the same as any other, by that point).
(Other than Englehart, there is one post 60s Marvel writer who has repeatedly demonstrated a true talent for discerning the essential driving concept of a character or title — and that’s John Byrne. Unfortunately, while Byrne can always see what makes a particular concept work, he is entirely driven by his ego, and so that instinct is always used to seek out whatever may be interesting about a character or concept, so Byrne can rip it to shreds and substitute something incredibly boring or inapppropriate, or both, in its place. Byrne is utterly incapable of working on anything that he doesn’t burn his own initials into indelibly, unfortunately, he’s a bad, boring, awful writer, so when he deconstructs things, what he leaves behind is never as good as what he destroyed.)
So why is THOR boring? Well, first, it’s boring for the same reason that all the other Marvel titles became boring somewhere around the late 60s, early 70s… because nobody plots like Kirby, and nobody but Steve Englehart and Steve Gerber ever wrote comics anywhere near as well, much less better, than Stan Lee.
But THOR is even more boring than other Marvel comics created in the same era, and why is that? Well, besides the fact that the title was never lucky enough to have Englehart or Gerber write it… it has no essential concept. And without that, it has no direction, nothing coherent that pulls it together and makes it work. Every time a new writer comes on the book, that writer either (a) has to recycle whatever worked under Lee and Kirby, which is boring, or (b) has to inject their own idea of what Thor’s underlying concept should be… which Simonson tried, by playing up Thor’s Norse mythology in a matter that even Lee and Kirby and Thomas never had… but the problem was, Simonson got bored with that and didn’t know what else to do, and eventually, started doing really stupid nonsense like, you know, the Thunder Frog.
To make Thor work, a writer first has to sit down and decide, what’s Thor’s underlying concept? Is he a slumming God, handing around Midgard because he loves the place? Is he Odin’s most faithful son, battling for Asgard against the treacherous forces of trolls and Loki?
Personally, I don’t think Thor should have his own book; I think he works best in AVENGERS, where he’s just this weird guy with a glorious background who helps them fight Kang. But if I were given the opportunity to write Thor, I would play up his connection to Asgard and do my best to make Asgard into a real place for the first time, exploring how it fits into the greater Marvel Universe… showing the various minor characters who make things work there, exploring their trade deals with various starfaring races, playing up the diplomatic angle, maybe even showing their court system… kind of like TALES OF ASGARD crossed with THE WIRE.
I’d probably also do some historical stories, like one where Thor is fighting for the Nazis in World War II… not because he’s been mind controlled, but because some of them are his worshippers and, well, he likes battle. That one would be fun, too.
But whatever you do with THOR, it’s going to be boring unless you figure out exactly what the book is about, and who you think Thor is, before you sit down and start writing it. Frankly, I don’t think many writers have done that… and of all of the ones who have worked on THOR, only Lee and Kirby were good enough to make that work.
I’m glad FA is still going as I used to enjoy the zine in the eighties.
I can’t agree with Mr Madigan that post Lee/Kirby writers like Simonson or (say) Miller on Daredevil have ignored the essential concept of what makes the characters tick. If that’s true then you might as well give up on Marvel all together because the clock is not going back to the Silve Age nor that of Gerber or Englehart.